All The Presidents' Faces

Artists Offer 42 Renditions Of `Hail To The Chief'

In light of Monday's holiday, the Hall of Presidents-featuring portraits of all 42 U.S. presidents-would seem like a darn patriotic notion.

Then again, considering it's the Neo-Futurists Hall of Presidents at the Neo-Futurarium in Andersonville, maybe not.

The Neo-Futurarium sits at 5153 N. Ashland Ave., on the second floor above a funeral home. It opened with performances of "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind," a collection of 30 plays performed in 60 minutes. It has been running for six years, and its success inspired Futurist board members to use their large space as an art gallery as well. In 1991, the Futurarium was born.

The Hall of Presidents is one of the largest showings to come to the Futurarium, according to board member and "Blind" performer Ayun Halliday, also a professional masseur. The exhibition is permanently installed, or, in other words, it will be on display at the Futurarium probably longer than most of its subjects served as president.

"We started thinking about a Hall of Presidents and how stupid and cornball that would be," says Halliday, who curated the exhibit with fellow board member Greg Kotis and friend Erich Wilhelm Zander. "But then we realized that it is impossible to think of certain eras and not think of the president, basically as a form of pop culture. I mean, no one remembers the Cabinet members but everyone remembers the president as a symbol of that time."

Because Halliday says that one of the intentions of the original futurist movement, which sprouted in Italy in the years before World War I, was to break down the barrier between art and its audience, the Neo-Futurists were very unexclusive as to who could paint the pictures.

"We didn't have a lot of preconceptions about who we wanted or what we wanted, we just put out a call for art," Halliday says.

She continues: "Our whole idea is to keep theater and art utilitarian, like the original futurists. Unfortunately, those guys were also fascists so we had to be the Neo-Futurists, or the non-violent offspring of that group." As well, the original futurists advocated destroying all museums and every vestige of the past, including any remembrances of political leaders.

All in all, 42 artists contributed the paintings of presidents (Grover Cleveland is painted twice because his terms were not consecutive). "We accepted everyone who wanted to participate," Halliday notes.

They did, however, try for unusual or ironic matches. For example, New York artist Chris Nguyen, who painted Lyndon Johnson, is a Vietnamese man who escaped from Vietnam the day Saigon fell.

"We also tried to find a Mexican-American artist to paint (James) Polk because of the Mexican-American War during his term, but we failed to find one who wanted to do it," Halliday says. Halliday painted Polk, though she says she would have preferred Jimmy Carter.

"Overall, we were very lucky," she says. "We thought everyone would want Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln. But actually, everyone wanted someone different, although we did get two requests for William Henry Harrison, who was in office for only 30 days." (Halliday's mom won the right to paint Harrison, and the Lincoln portrait was painted by 7-year-old Chicagoan Elaina Gurrero.)

The show isn't all amateurs or members of the Halliday family. Better known alternative artists also contributed, such as "Culture Vultures" comic book artist Jim Siergey, with a humorous look at John F. Kennedy, and established artist Christopher Knowles, who painted Carter. The Guerrilla Girls of New York painted George Bush.

Professional illustrator Steve Musgrave of Chicago did a charcoal portrait of John Quincy Adams. "By the time I joined the project, he was about the only one left," Musgrave says. "At first, I wanted Lincoln, but actually it was kind of nice not to have the responsibility of having a great president."

Adds Musgrave: "Besides, no one really knows what John Quincy Adams looked like, so it's not like you'd have a bunch of people standing around saying, `Oh, that doesn't look like him.' " Musgrave managed to find a few pictures and a painting of the sixth president so he could at least try to capture some resemblance.

"We were really surprised at the amount of research our artists put into their portraits and by how much we all learned about the presidents," Halliday says. "I always thought of (William) Taft as just some fat guy, but Eileen Sanger, who painted Taft, felt he was very inspirational, and did just a beautiful pastel portrait of him that makes him look very dignified."

Chicagoan Georgianne Scholz, who painted James Buchanan, took inspiration from the "tear-off" information cards on the elevated trains and included a box filled with notecards about Buchanan that people could take from the side of the painting.

"You learn many things that are surprising about these presidents," Halliday says. "They all have skeletons in their closets that rival any of the ones that (Bill) Clinton gets called on the carpet for all the time."

All viewpoints welcome

Not that the show expresses only the "hard-core liberal" views of the Futurarium board, Halliday says. "Some of the older artists did portraits that are very patriotic. Jean Chernoff, who did Clinton, for example, has a great deal of respect for the office, while the artist who did Kennedy does not. Together, it shows that we have to accommodate all viewpoints and not just our own."

Even so, Halliday says the later presidents do get ribbed a bit more in their portraits than do the early ones. "I think it's just easier for the artists to feel more forgiving to the president who lived in the 1800s and lost three children or whatever than it is to feel that way toward the president who raised your taxes."

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The Neo-Futurists Hall of Presidents, 5153 N. Ashland Ave., makes its debut at 9 p.m. Saturday. The band The Report Covers will perform, and admission is free. For information on exhibit hours, call 312-275-5255.